Independent guides to building on Skool
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Skool makes starting a community pretty easy.
The bigger questions usually come next.
That’s what skool.build is here to help with.
Straight answers about building on Skool, what it costs, how it works and what I’d want to know before starting one.
Featured Research
TRENDING SKOOLS — SEPTEMBER 2026
What stood out wasn't just which communities were trending, but what their members actually said about them.
Read the September research →For the right kind of community, I think it can be.
You get the community, courses, events and other tools together without having to piece together a pile of different software.
But that doesn’t automatically make it the right home for every community.
The more useful question is what are you trying to build, and does Skool suit it?
Skool has a $9 Hobby plan and a $99 Pro plan.
That makes the $9 plan a very cheap way to start, but the monthly subscription isn't the only cost to look at.
The plans have different transaction fees, so if you're building a paid community, the cheapest plan can eventually stop being the cheapest option.
Prices and fees can change. I show when the information was last checked and link to Skool's current pricing.
They both let you build a community.
That doesn't mean people use them the same way.
Facebook is built around a feed. Someone can stumble across your group post while they're already scrolling.
Skool is more intentional. People generally need a reason to go back.
There are advantages to that — but it's a difference I'd want to understand before moving an existing community across.
Yes.
But there's a fairly important “but”.
You don't need an existing audience to create the community.
You do still need a way to find people who want to join it.
Skool has Discovery and other ways communities can be found, but I wouldn't start one assuming the platform is going to solve the audience problem for me.
Creating the actual community is the straightforward part.
The decisions before you invite anyone in matter more: who it's for, why they'd join, what they'll find when they arrive and whether you're building something free or paid.
You don't need 47 modules and six months of content waiting for them.
You do need a reason for the right person to say “Yep, that's for me.”
This is where some different questions start turning up.
Yes. You don't need an existing audience to start a Skool community. But starting without an audience doesn't mean you can avoid finding one. Your first members still have to discover you somewhere.
They might come from people you already know, direct outreach, content, search, referrals, other communities, or from people discovering you inside Skool.
If your community is aimed at Skool owners, spending time in communities full of Skool owners makes sense. If your community is about career change, dog training or jewellery collecting, becoming visible to thousands of community owners may create attention without creating many relevant members.
So rather than asking:
Where can I get attention?
ask:
Where are the people who actually have the problem my community solves?
Starting the community is the easy part. The harder job is finding a small number of people who genuinely want what you've created.
Your first members can come from people you already know, an existing audience, direct outreach, relevant communities, content, referrals, search or paid traffic.
But where they come from matters less than whether they're the right people.
I've learned this the hard way. Twice I invited around five people into new communities as free beta testers. It made the groups look less empty, but it didn't create the participation or useful feedback I'd hoped for.
Five people joining is not the same as five people wanting to be there.
Do they understand what it's for? Do they come back? What do they ask about? What do they ignore? Do they participate without being chased? And if you eventually want people to pay, are you solving a problem they care enough about?
Start by finding a few people who genuinely fit.
If your community is not showing in Skool Discovery, there are two separate things to check:
whether your community is eligible for Discovery, and whether Growth Boost is turned on.
Skool Discovery is the internal place where people can find communities through Skool itself. To appear there, Skool still requires communities to meet minimum setup and activity requirements, such as having a completed description, About page content, cover image, and enough members, posts and activity.
But Discovery visibility is now closely connected to Growth Boost.
Growth Boost is Skool's promotion system. It can include external advertising, but it also affects how much Skool promotes your community inside its own network.
In the current Skool interface, turning Growth Boost off shows "No Skool traffic (no discovery)" and warns that your rank will decrease and your community will become harder to find in Discovery.
So if your community has already met the basic requirements but is still barely visible, check Growth Boost before assuming you simply need more posts or members.
Skool Growth Boost is a promotion system designed to bring paying members to your community.
Skool can promote participating communities inside its own network, including through Skool Discovery, and outside Skool through advertising. Instead of asking you to pay the advertising cost upfront, Skool takes a commission when a customer is attributed to Growth Boost.
The minimum Growth Boost commission is currently 30%.
If Skool finds you a paying member you probably wouldn't have acquired yourself, keeping 70% of a new sale can be a perfectly reasonable trade. You didn't have to fund the advertising upfront, and you gained a customer you may not otherwise have had.
Skool uses last-touch attribution, with a 14-day attribution window for Skool referrals. That means the final attributed source before someone joins can determine who receives credit for the customer.
That's worth understanding because Growth Boost commission is based on customers attributed to Skool, not simply on whether you believe you originally introduced that person to your community.
In the current Skool interface, turning Growth Boost off warns that you'll lose Skool traffic and become harder to find in Discovery.
Don't judge Growth Boost by traffic alone. Judge it by the customers it adds that you probably wouldn't have acquired without it.
Skool community reviews are different from ordinary testimonials.
A community owner can choose which testimonials to put on a sales page. Skool reviews are part of the platform itself, and community owners can't simply opt out of having them or remove a poor review because they don't like it.
People who have actually paid for access can review a community, including one-time-payment members.
Owners and admins can't review their own communities, and Skool prohibits offering incentives in exchange for reviews.
A five-star review is still one person's opinion. Members can have very different experiences, and a community with only a handful of reviews doesn't give you the same evidence as one with hundreds.
Read what members actually say, how many reviews there are and, where available, how long reviewers have been members.
Skool community ratings and review counts can now appear directly in Google search results.
If people have joined your Skool community but nobody seems to be doing anything, don't immediately assume you need better posts or more engagement tricks.
Start with a more basic question:
Did the right people join in the first place?
I've experienced this myself. I've brought free beta testers into new communities expecting their presence to create conversation and useful feedback. Instead, people joined, and very little happened.
That doesn't mean every quiet member is the wrong member. Some people naturally read, watch and learn without posting much.
The better signal is whether people come back and do something useful, not whether every member writes posts.
Give people an obvious, low-effort first action instead.
It could be answering one specific question, choosing between two options, sharing one thing they're working on, commenting on a lesson they've just completed, or replying to another member.
Ask follow-up questions. Introduce people with similar problems. Give members reasons to respond to each other rather than making every conversation run through you.
Start with enough to help someone understand why they're there, what to do first and what small result they can get.
I want skool.build to be fairly simple.
You have a question about building on Skool. I try to give you a useful answer.
If I'm writing about a current Skool price, feature or rule, I'll use current information and link to the official source wherever possible.
If I'm talking about something I've actually tried, I'll tell you what happened.
Those are two different things, and I'll keep them that way.
Sometimes the answer will be “it depends.”
I'll try to tell you what it depends on.
I've built more than one Skool community.
I've started one without an existing audience and discovered just how difficult those first real members can be to find.
I've also tried the complete opposite.
I brought roughly 1,200 people across from an audience I'd already built.
I thought that would make things easier.
It didn't.
Having people join didn't automatically create an active community. They still needed a reason to come back.
I've also spent years running large online communities outside Skool, particularly on Facebook, so I've been able to see some of the differences between the platforms first-hand.
I don't have a secret formula for Skool.
I do have enough experience to know that:
Getting people to join and getting people to come back are two completely different problems.
That's probably the biggest thing I wish I'd understood before I started.
skool.build is an independent website. It is not owned by, operated by, affiliated with or endorsed by Skool.
Some links on this site are affiliate links. If you create a Skool through one of those links, I may receive a commission at no additional cost to you.
That won't change what I write.
If I've tried something myself, I'll tell you what happened.
If something changes, I'll update it.
And if I don't know the answer yet, I'll say that too.